‘The end of dieting’: How new health trackers claim to improve your health by offering insight into your body

The care and keeping of one’s body is an ongoing project — and there’s an overwhelming amount of information out there on how best to do so. Eating plans from keto to plant-based to paleo claim that they’re the best ways to keep your body thriving from the inside out, just as there’s an ongoing debate about whether HIIT workouts or long walks are best for maintaining a fit physique.

Yet there’s a problem with many of these wellness tips: They don’t take into account that every body is different, and therefore might need different things to thrive.

That’s why certain companies are moving away from prescriptive answers about wellness and instead are aiming to empower their customers by providing them statistics about how their specific bodies operate. Could learning more about what goes on inside our bodies over time help us end the one-size-fits-all approach to wellness and instead focus on what makes us as individuals feel good and stay healthy?

The Oura Ring, a wearable that provides customers with a breadth of information about their bodies, hopes to give people the information they need to make smart lifestyle choices. The ring provides wearers with scores from 0 to 100 on Readiness, Sleep, and Activity. Your Readiness score is perhaps the most significant in terms of telling you how to approach the day: It answers the question of whether you should crush a spin class, or veg out on the couch.

“The reason Oura is so powerful is because it takes that integrated approach,” Caroline Kryder, science communications lead at Oura, tells Yahoo Life. “Your Readiness score is made up of, ‘How are you sleeping? How is your activity?’ It gives you a holistic picture. If your body looks like it’s ready for something, we’ll scale up your activity. If it doesn’t, we’ll scale it down. It’s not about 10,000 steps, it’s not about just one goal.”

Oura, instead, “rewards you for resting” — assuming rest is what your body needs.

“We don’t believe you should be doing a HIIT class every day or running six miles,” Kryder explains.

It’s not just about daily goals, either, but about trends over time. Many use the Oura Ring to track their menstrual cycle, thanks to the ring’s ability to record even the slightest changes in body temperature. (Often one’s body temperature increases during the second half of one’s menstrual cycle.) Though the Oura Ring is not a medical device, it has worked with organizations like the NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, and UFC on a Health Risk Management platform in order to monitor the wellness of those participating. MMA fighter Daniel Cormier even claimed that his Oura Ring predicted he had COVID-19, allowing him to quarantine.

Ultimately, the Oura Ring provides a way to check in with oneself about how they may be affected by certain stressors and life events. If working late means eating dinner at 11 p.m., your Oura Ring may be able to see how that late meal interferes with your sleep, thanks to an increased resting heart rate. It’s therefore possible to tweak one’s lifestyle with these metrics in mind.

If the Oura Ring is about a holistic approach to activity and rest, Lumen wants you to have the same information when it comes to what you put in your body.

Lumen, a device which measures whether one’s body is currently using fat or carbs as fuel, analyzes one’s breath, then provides a score between 1 and 5 — 1 being “burning fat,” and 5 being “burning carbs.” It encourages users to test their breath in the morning and after key moments throughout the day, such as after eating and exercise, and then provides meal suggestions to get its users to hit the fat-burning zone in the morning.

The hope, according to Lumen chief executive officer and co-founder Daniel Tal Mor, is that Lumen will herald "the end of dieting."

“When you think about people wanting to make a change to their nutrition, they will usually talk to a friend, or look online, and eventually they will start a diet,” Tal Mor tells Yahoo Life. “They will adopt a philosophy that was born in a marketing environment. They think it will have quick results. It will be very simple — maybe, five things to do, five things to avoid. It’s like that because it needs to be sharable, and successful very fast … But this idea of dieting pushes us away from healthy habits and away from health.”

But tracking your body’s data isn’t limited to just tech companies. Even household brand names are finding ways to incorporate tracking. Gatorade, for one, is getting in on the action by creating a “sweat patch” that can help users recover after exercise. Unlike other devices, the Gx Sweat Patch can be used once. It is placed on one’s arm during exercise, where it fills with sweat. The used patch is then scanned by the Gx App, to reveal the user’s sweat rate and sodium loss.

“The Gx App shares actionable recommendations on training, recovery, hydration and nutrition based on their sweat profile and exercise data," Drew Palin, senior director of Digital Innovation at Gatorade, tells Yahoo Life. "For example, if an athlete is planning to go for a 5-mile run, the Gx App will suggest certain protein and hydration consumption amounts or stretching needs prior to and after their workout.”

All of these devices provide information that, manufacturers hope, their users will find valuable — but could they really change the game in terms of moving away from a standardized approach to fitness and healthy eating?

Dr. Nina Shapiro, author of Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice — How to Tell What's Real and What's Not, and professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, tells Yahoo Life that these devices can be useful — but they have their limitations.

These kinds of devices "can be very helpful, but people need to remember that they don't do the work for them,” Shapiro explains. “They act as an adjuvant to activities such as exercise, good sleep habits, eating, and even meditation and other relaxation practices. They do a great job of helping people set and stick to goals in any of these areas, and occasionally they can signal areas of concern — such as a heart rate that is too high or too low, poor sleep hygiene, or too sedentary of a lifestyle.”

However, for as much data as one can gather from these devices, what they can’t replace is a doctor’s visit.

“I think people need to recognize that these are accessories to good health habits, but not the whole answer,” Shapiro notes. “They give really good snippets of data, but nothing replaces a good physical with one's doctor to fully assess health status.”

She also points out that there can be a few unexpected “downsides” to tracking everything that goes on in your body, including the fact that some devices may be less accurate than others.

“There have been some studies showing that those engaged in weight loss regimens have had poorer outcomes when using fitness trackers, as the devices can actually be demoralizing and can sometimes cause the opposite of the desired effect — less exercise or improvement in nutrition habits,” Shapiro notes. “Last, some become too focused on their device stats and lose out on the joys of exercise, food, and sleep.”

Dr. Anne McTiernan, a professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who studies ways to prevent new or recurrent cancer through lifestyle factors, also notes that one should make sure these devices fit into their life in a healthy way.

“Some people can become obsessed with any monitoring, such as the person who weighs themselves several times a day,” McTiernan explains. “In such a case it’s worth talking with your doctor about your health concerns.”

Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, points out, “If having to collect data makes you anxious, then a biotracker is a bad choice. Biotrackers are a form of research. The wearer is now the researcher. As with all research projects, it makes sense to think about what you want the data for and how you will use it before you launch the study.”

Assuming these devices fit into your budget, however, Rutledge explains they may be worth a try as long as you're clear on what you're hoping to get out of them.

“It’s always fun at the start,” Rutledge tells Yahoo Life. “The real question is if it is serving any useful purpose or helping you make better choices about your activity, whether it’s exercise, sleep or stress management.”

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